20 February 2006

Preaching in Romanian

One of the responsibilities which I have in our Romanian church (proDEO), is that I am part of the preaching team. There are three of us on this team, Adrian Lauran (the senior pastor), Doru Tiulete (one of the associate pastors) and myself. We are currently preaching though the book of Act from start to finish.

At proDEO we generally meet as an entire church body every two weeks. On alternate Sundays we break into three smaller house groups where we can discuss the message from the week before in more detail.

As we plan to get through the book of Acts in about a year, but we are only preaching from the book twice a month, each sermon has to cover a chapter or more. This is not usually a problem since our Sunday morning sermons are usually ah hour long and you can say a lot in an hour.

My problem, though, has been that I have been preaching in English, which effectively cuts the amount of time which I have to preach down to 30 minutes or so. For our study, half an hour is not really enough time to flesh out a whole chapter. To eliminate this problem, I decided last month that I would finally start preaching in Romanian.

I have been speaking Romanian for more than five years and I really do not have any trouble at all conversing with someone in the language, but there is a lot of specialized, theological vocabulary which I still do not know very well which makes it daunting to speak at length about Biblical issues. Romanian is also a very complex language grammatically and so I will often find myself in the middle of a conversation and realize that I have no idea what the "right" way is of completing the sentence I have already started. This is not a problem in a casual conversation, but it is obviously not the ideal situation to find oneself in when preaching to 70 people.

It was those issues that kept me from attempting to preach in Romanian in the past. But it just did not seem right for me to keep preaching in English. I finally became a member of proDEO last month and we are working towards living here year-round. This really is our home and I felt that not preaching in Romanian was the last big thing which set me apart as an outsider here.

So, last month I gave my first sermon in Romanian and I preached the second yesterday. Reactions to my Romanian-language preaching have been mixed. Most people really appreciate the effort which I have made to prepare in Romanian, which obviously requires much more effort on my part than preparing a sermon in English. There are some people though, who have found it to be distracting when I occasionally butcher the language, although there seem to be far fewer members of this group.

It has been good for me to prepare sermons in Romanian, since it has forced me to learn some of the Christian words and phrases that I really should have mastered years ago. It is also good for me, since over time it will improve my ability to speak Romanian in all contexts. Practice makes perfect. In fact, I have already gotten feedback from church members that my sermon yesterday was delivered much more naturally than the one before. That was encouraging and I hope the pattern continues.

We'll find out soon enough. I am preaching again in two weeks.

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